Submitted by Thomas Kolbe
Will 2027 be the year the wealth register is introduced? Labor Minister Bärbel Bas confirmed this week on Bild that her ministry plans a representative survey of citizens next year on their assets and their views on distributive justice. A classic about-face by this government: just three weeks earlier, Bas had categorically ruled out any such plans.
Concretely, a tax-funded data collection effort involving roughly 5,000 citizens is planned. The rollout will run through an external research institute as part of an EU-wide tender, whose bidding deadline closes September 1.
"Survey experiment on wealth inequality in the population" is the innocuous-sounding name for this study — likely nothing more than a first step toward a comprehensive wealth register.
Cloaked in the mantle of scientific inquiry, politics is edging, step by step, toward the sensitive issue that has hung over the political debate for years like a sword of Damocles: the wealth register. This register — one of numerous European Union projects — is ultimately meant to enable seamless, individualized wealth assessments: the perfect tax base for the perfectly transparent citizen.
What's new here isn't really the format: similar wealth surveys have already been conducted every four years by institutes like Berlin's DIW. What's truly new is the explicit political framing and normative interpretation of the results.
Of course wealth distribution in Germany is unequal — a natural outcome of a free-market order, and an integral part of a system rooted in the principle that reward should follow performance.
The survey design and the interpretation of its results dock directly onto this inequality, and are meant to legitimize policy options such as introducing a wealth tax, raising inheritance taxes, or other redistributive meas
